Jeanette Shellard's documented formative training took place at Durham University in the city of Durham in northern England, before her entry into the English legal profession. The university had awarded law degrees since its establishment in the 1830s, mainly to graduates already working in the law, so legal study formed part of its long academic tradition.
Shellard studied at Durham University, where she took a Bachelor of Arts degree. The university's alumni organization, Dunelm, can trace its roots to the Durham University Association founded in 1866, and to later societies formed in 1905 and 1921.
The university's law school, Durham Law School, was established in 1964. Regular law lectures had begun at Armstrong College in Newcastle in 1907, and a formal law school was established there in 1923 before Newcastle became independent of Durham in 1963.
In 1982 Shellard was admitted to the bar in England, marking her entry into the English legal profession.
Shellard worked as a partner of Theodore Goddard, a London law firm. The firm was founded in 1902 by the solicitor John Theodore Goddard, who began practising on his own account and later became known nationally for acting for Wallis Simpson in her divorce proceedings in 1936.
By 1946 the firm had eight partners. Its offices at Sergeant's Inn in the Temple area, to which it had moved in 1917, were destroyed in a Blitz air raid together with most of its records, after which the firm relocated to New Court behind the Law Courts.
In 2003 Theodore Goddard merged with Addleshaw Booth & Co to form Addleshaw Goddard, a limited liability partnership with a wider network of offices.
